Thursday, August 15, 2013

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart V

"To start off, the book was not relatable at all. As I started reading the book, I was forced to immediately try to understand their culture and beliefs ... The book gave me no motivation to continue reading it at all."

"History really bores me."

"I don't care about the stuff that happens in Africa!"

"Well, this started to look like a good promising book, but the names of the characters are African and it's very hard to keep track of who's who, you forget because the character's names are so hard to remember, they're African names"

"You know how when you're at a buffet, and you see a type of dish that you either can't eat or don't like, and you avoid it altogether? Yeah. That's how I felt."

"I'm sorry... I'm western, I sympathise with Africa's colonization. But this book is serving one purpose - to give Africans a voice."

"Just plain terrible. I did not understand the point of this story. Was there even a central idea? I don't know. The writting style did not captivate my and the use of african words made it difficult for me to read and follow."

"Nothing unique was brought to the table, and the book ends on a disappointing and unfullfilling note. The same story could have been applied to any other oppressed culture, such as Native Americans, and the results would be exactly the same."

"Pure anti-American and anti-Western propaganda!
Do you hate the West? Just fill your head with crap from this book and you will hate the West even more.

This is Poison. I was forced to read this in college by some dumb-ass liberal professor who had a grudge against the West."

"What really amazes me, looking back, is how the author accepted the 'great men' and their casual and consistent brutality for much of the book... and then, when more powerful (European) forces came in and made THEM knuckle under, well, THAT was tragic."

"This book made me disrespect a culture I knew little about before reading it."

"Though an easy read, Things Fall Apart is overly simplistic and irrelevant. Its only value to me is as a way to get to know African culture and the historical context of Colonial Africa. Besides that, it fails to address anything universal or significant."

"I did not like this book at all. Its brutality and weird culture definitely made me disgusted."

"I get it...it's an African culture that is different from my own. But that in itself doesn't make it a good book! I don't need multiple stories about beating women to see how misogynistic and violent that culture is. And the Christian missionaries came in and tried to convert them and change their culutre? Big freakin surprise...not. Zzz. Boring."

"This book did an amazing job of showing how the missionaries came to a place that wasn't progressing as fast as where they came form"

"The portrayal of African natives is not flattering enough to generate real sympathy for their culture. If Achebe thought that this would produce positive reactions to native culture, he went about it in a very strange way. Wife-beating, infanticide, and primitive superstitious beliefs are easy to throw away for the peace and harmony found in Christianity."

"The climax seemed to be the author taking out his personal dislike of white people and Christians, which, as a white Christian, I didn't appreciate. I'm tired of hearing about how horrible white people are all the time. If we were a society that was truly about promoting equality, we would stop constantly slamming the whites."

"If there was a point to this book, I missed it. I didn't find the style particularly outstanding; the character development was limited; the extensive use of non-English words was a distraction. I don't know what I was supposed to get out of it, but I didn't get it."